iPod RevisionCasting

WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com... Learning

On my drive back home today I reflected on the fact that I’d seen pretty much every Year 11 I’d encountered during the day show some evidence that they owned an iPod. I decided that there’s got to be some way of using these devices for educational purposes. The obvious way, of course, is podcasting. But then, new iPods have colour screens. What about having Powerpoint-style presentations as a series of images?

The best way to do this is still taking shape in my head, but for now I’ve used OpenOffice Impress to save a basic 3-slide presentation on the NHS (for the GCSE History Medicine Through Time module) in the correct format to be shown on an iPod:

NHS revision 01

NHS revision 02

NHS revision 03

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to actually test these as my iPod is a 4th-generation rather than 5th-generation and therefore doesn’t have a colour screen… :( (donations gratefully received!)

To do this yourself, you simply need to create a presentation that has no more than 3 points with rather large text. A couple of pictures is always useful as well. In OpenOffice Impress select the slide you want to export and go to File/Export. Save each slide as a JPEG with names such as nhs_revision_01, nhs_revision_02, etc. Finally, go to your favourite image editor and resize each image to 320×240. You could then either upload each file individually to your website or collate them into a zip file. Students should then be able to scroll through the different slides in order on their iPod.

I’d be very grateful if someone could confirm the example I’ve given above works! :D

Oh, and before Dan Lyndon moans, yes this is a re-jigged version of your original Powerpoint! :p

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3 Responses to “iPod RevisionCasting”


  1. 1 Ian May 25th, 2006 at 2:35 pm

    Love your blog. I found this article fascinating. I have been thinking of doing revision podcasts in the form of radio plays, e.g. Who was the greatest doctor? I remember the old days when pupils used to listen to radio plays. A tool that has sadly disappeared but in the world ofiPods will appeal to some learners. I run Macs so condensing our school videos/dvd to run on iPods is easy using software like iSquint, but there are copyright issues. I like the ideas of slides and I will look into this. Macs can save presentation programs as Quicktime moves which will then play on an iPods (I think).

  2. 2 dan lyndon May 30th, 2006 at 3:09 pm

    Moan, me? au contraire mon ami, I think that is a marvellous ppoint you put up there. Oh and your idea is pretty good too!

  1. 1 Primary Teacher UK Trackback on May 25th, 2006 at 5:50 pm
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